Jon Bright bought his spacious brick house on Altamont Circle in 2000; he already owned the one next door. They’re both close to a century old, and together they’ve supplied Bright, an after-work do-it-yourselfer, with an endless series of refinishing and remodeling projects. (His approach: “I put out the worst fires first.”) One of those jobs: Starting at the southwest corner of his house, Bright has circled the exterior, stripping and repainting the soffit, windows and trim. He’s almost all the way around now, and looking forward to finishing up the job this summer by tackling his favorite spot: the front porch. A new paint job will spiff it up, sure—the gray floor and white columns are flaking a little. But it could hardly be more comfortable than it already is. I sat down in one of the padded chairs and listened to Bright talk about life on the porch, where, as he says, “you are naked to the world.”
 The porch needs a touchup, which it’ll get this summer, but Jon Bright (second from right) and friends are pretty happy with it already. |
‘‘This is called The Porch. People will say ‘Are you going to be on The Porch tonight?’ One neighbor every spring says, ‘Is it still O.K. if I sit on your porch swing and read [when you’re not home]?’ It’s the communal porch, which is very cool. Many people have looked out [from a nearby large apartment building] and seen us on our porch, or when they’re walking dogs they’ll see us. They come strolling over and bring their drink of choice and sit here with [my girlfriend and me] and we talk politics or whatever. The TV doesn’t get turned on all summer long.
“I’ll work on the house until 8 or 9 at night. Then I’ll grab a cold drink, sit till 11 or 11:30, watch the world go by. Or on a Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood is showing up, walking by. We try to have a summer party each year, and one year it started pouring down rain [the morning of the party]. I called everybody and said I don’t know if we can have the party; it’s raining. They said we’ll just sit on the porch. We had probably 25 people on the porch.
“Many people don’t know these houses are here. We know everybody around the circle. It’s fun because we are a little enclave back here and we know all our neighbors. You can look and see the steeple of the church Downtown. It’s strangely very quiet here, even with McIntire Road and High Street right there. You can hear Amtrak pull in [to the W. Main Street station] at 9 o’clock. Every time we hear it we look at our watches and say ‘Yep, it’s on time today’ or ‘it’s late today.’
“My daughter was going to the University of Montana a couple of years ago, and I was visiting her. I got a phone call from a friend; he said, ‘Where are you at? We’re sitting here on your porch with a bottle of Bloody Mary mix.’ I said, ‘I’m in Montana.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll be here all afternoon.’”
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